Blair – Iraq war will withstand test of history
Prime Minister Tony Blair, shoulder to shoulder with US counterpart George W Bush, has delivered a robust defence of the rationale to launch military action against Iraq, despite lingering questions over the intelligence assessing Saddam Hussein’s lethal weaponry.
Mr Blair leapfrogged the Atlantic yesterday to speak to the US Congress. He is the fourth British prime minister to do so, following in the footsteps of Atlee, Churchill and Thatcher.
He received a hero’s welcome with 17 standing ovations. At home, the story could not be any more different. Critics claim he is increasingly beleaguered as the Labour leader, with the damage and political fallout of the unpopular war yet to be fully grasped.
Faced with the ‘menace’ of Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship, Mr Blair said he was confident the decision to go to war against Iraq was right as it had eliminated ‘inhuman carnage and suffering,’ even if the intelligence prior to the war were wrong.
“That is something I am confident history will forgive,” Mr Blair said.
Mr Blair made a thought-provoking, encompassing speech, covering Third World poverty, ecology, terrorism, US and Europe, the Middle East and religious fanaticism.
He said: “And the threat comes because in another part of our globe there is shadow and darkness, where not all the world is free, where many millions suffer under brutal dictatorship, where a third of our planet lives in a poverty beyond anything even the poorest in our societies can imagine, and where a fanatical strain of religious extremism has arisen that is a mutation of the true and peaceful faith of Islam.”
Mr Bush, at a news conference after Mr Blair’s speech, reaffirmed his assertion that Iraq, if left unchecked, would have had tried to acquire nuclear weapons.
He said: “Saddam Hussein produced and possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program,” Bush said at a joint press conference at the White House.
“The regime of Saddam Hussein was a grave and growing threat. Given Saddam’s history of violence and aggression, it would have been reckless to place our trust in his sanity or his restraint.”
Mr Bush said the PM was as “a leader of conviction of passion of moral clarity and eloquence.”
Mr Blair now speeds off to Asia on a new diplomatic effort. First in Japan this weekend. Then a short hop to South Korea, and onwards to China and Hong Kong.
